“Airservices Australia were looking to significantly upgrade their media engagement by offering photos and videos with their media releases. They were happy to rely on our experience in this area; the brief was simply “build us something that works! “

“Even with such a broad outline of requirements, we managed to deliver an online newsroom that exceeded Airservices’ expectations.”

Airservices’ brand new newsroom (http://newsroom.airservicesaustralia.com) received its first big – and unexpected – test during the recent volcanic ash incident, which caused widespread disruption to air traffic in Australia and New Zealand.

“It was really a baptism of fire for the technology from our point of view. We were in the midst of user-testing the system within our own team and with select media when the ash cloud arrived in Australian airspace,” Airservices Senior Communication and Media Adviser, Matt Wardell said.

“With a rapidly increasing demand for content from both domestic and international media, we made a decision to ‘launch’ the site to all media earlier than intended and the newsroom really came into its own,” he said.

“Within days we had the majority of the major domestic media network registered and we used the newsroom to distribute press releases, imagery, audio and video for the duration of the incident.”

This reduced the number of calls the busy Airservices media team had to field at the peak of the incident and allowed them to focus strategically on the media response to the impacts of a previously unheard of volcano on Australian air travel.

“We were able to position Airservices as a credible, trustworthy provider of information in relation to the status of the national air traffic network, raising public awareness and confidence in what we do on a daily basis,” Matt said.